Outside Magazine - March 2008

Wake Them Up With a Splash

How to bring the world's freshwater woes
into focus? Try 3-D. On one of the most ambitious Imax projects to
date, 44 river warriors including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Wade Davis
go sloshing down the Grand Canyon—and try not to drop the
million-dollar cameras into the drink.

By Michael Roberts

HE RAFTED THE GRAND CANYON lying on a mattress.

Greg MacGillivray, 62, had concluded that this was the only way he
could make his movie. He was suffering from a herniated disk and unable
to endure the spinal compression that comes with sitting upright while
boinging down Class IV and V rapids. So the veteran Imax director went
to Home Depot and bought a waterproof chaise lounge mattress designed
for the rigors of outdoor barbecues and mounted it in the bow of a
guided raft, adding straps for his arms and legs so he wouldn't be
bucked into the Colorado. On September 13, 2006, he put in to the river
at Lees Ferry as the grinning figurehead of one of the largest
expeditions in modern Grand Canyon history.

Forty-four team members in eight rafts, six kayaks, and two wooden dories started downriver that day. Led by guide Regan Dale,
they were packing some 10,000 pounds of gear, including 20 cameras, 57
miles of 70mm film, 600 eggs, and 200 loaves of bread. Concealed in
cameraman Doug Lavender's lens case were bottles of Grey Goose and
Johnnie Walker. MacGillivray's four Imax cameras included two massive,
boxy 3-D models, each worth a million dollars and weighing 350 pounds.
It took at least four people to lift one.

The group included elite paddlers Steve Fisher, Anthony Yap, Rush Sturges, and other pros from the Teva Tribe (the shoe brand was a principal funder for the project), and a Park
Service ranger who helped them avoid fragile areas. While they were
granted a special permit to combine motorized and nonmotorized craft,
they were forbidden to spend more than two nights at any campsite or to
backtrack upriver, which meant they had to get their shots right the
first time and move on. (Given that it costs $40 a second to shoot in
3-D, this wasn't an entirely unwelcome situation.)

MacGillivray's goal was to create an enthralling adventure story
that would lure millions into those steep Imax theaters so he could
terrify—and motivate—them with the stark realities of America's growing
water crisis. To boost the film's pop appeal, he asked Dave Matthews Band bassist Stefan Lessard to compose the soundtrack and signed up two
charismatic environmental advocates: Waterkeeper Alliance chairman and NRDC senior attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and
anthropologist-explorer-author Wade Davis. Both experienced river
runners—Kennedy, a kayaker, has made first descents of several remote
rivers in South America, and Davis is a licensed whitewater guide in
his native British Columbia—they are known for their passionate
defenses of wild places. Their role was to articulate the ominous
challenges facing rivers across the West, but especially the Colorado,
a once vibrant waterway tamed by massive dams and endangered by thirsty
crops and sprawling development. To add character appeal to the story
(or maybe to keep the guys' orating habits in check), MacGillivray also
invited their oldest daughters.

The result, Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk,
rolls out in mid-March. In December, I sat down with MacGillivray,
Kennedy, and Davis in Washington, D.C., to talk about the pleasure and
pain of the trip, America's scary freshwater problems, and the
solutions that are within our grasp—if we can just commit to them.

IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK

OUTSIDE:Rat on each other: Who fought on the river? Who was the crybaby?

DAVIS: It's embarrassing to say, but everything
went remarkably smoothly. On river expeditions, there's generally a
point when things begin to unravel. But in this case, it was almost
effortless.

MACGillivray: There was that time Jack Tankard jumped into the fire.

OUTSIDE:!?!?!

GILLIVRAY: He was one of our trusted cameramen and
that crazy guy everyone falls in love with. He'd write music and
perform it at the drop of a hat—and he's unique, let's say. So, yeah,
one night he fell into the campfire. It was out, but the coals were
still warm. He didn't really feel much pain. He'd, uh, had a few
drinks.

DAVIS: In retrospect, this trip was quite a gamble.
You take Bobby and his daughter Kick, myself and my daughter Tara, and
put us all together, and none of us knew each other. If for some reason
there had been a personality clash, it would have been impossible to
hide. But Tara and Kick are now bosom buddies, and Bobby and I found
out that it was almost a miracle that our lives haven't intersected
before.

KENNEDY: I had owned a whitewater company that did
first descents all over Latin America, and I'd lived in Indian
villages. When Wade and I started talking, we figured out that we had
been in the same river valley in Colombia at the same time. We'd
probably been the only two white people there at the time.

DAVIS: On this trip, part of the joy was the
challenge of dealing with all the equipment. Carrying a 350-pound
camera to the top of a 1,000-foot wall was certainly a bonding
experience.

GILLIVRAY: That was remarkable. About eight people,
including Wade and Bobby, lugged that thing for an hour and a half up
switchbacks—with all the accessories, all the batteries, all the
magazines of film. We strapped it to the cliff and left it there
overnight, then went back up for another shot the next morning.

OUTSIDE:Wade, you've descended dozens of rivers, but this was your first run down the Colorado. How does it compare?

DAVIS: It's so unrelenting—one cataract after
another. My highlight was probably Lava Falls, which I'd been hearing
about forever. When I floated the idea that I'd like to take a crack at
rowing Lava, Greg lit up and said, "That's cool—we can film it!" But I
had no idea what he had in mind. I woke up the next morning and they
were rigging this Rube Goldberg contraption for mounting the Imax 3-D
camera right behind my head. There was another great moment when we
were all at a spot called Redwall Cavern and suddenly this storm
gathered. You study the geology of the canyon and you read Thoreau
writing about the gentle movement of wind upon rock, and then you
suddenly see a flash flood for the first time and you see that this is
not about anything gentle.

KENNEDY: There wasn't a cloud in the sky, and it
was pouring rain. Waterfalls started bursting off the sides of the
canyon, but they were brown.

DAVIS: Brown and kicking off stones with these explosions. It was really wild.

THAT SUCKING SOUND

OUTSIDE:Bobby, you first ran the Colorado 40 years ago with your family. How different is the river today?

KENNEDY: When we took our trip in '67, Lake Powell was just filling up, so the
river was still turbid and warm. There were eight species of native
fish—now there are only four. A lot of the mammals that lived near the
river then, like the otter and the muskrat, are gone. We went down with
a large group and camped on these giant sandbars, and now most of those
are gone. The Colorado has been degraded from this monument to
America's heritage into a glorified plumbing system that connects these
two big reservoirs. It's lost a lot of its natural values. And it's
being sucked dry. What's happening to the Colorado is a warning of
what's happening to the whole desert West.

DAVIS: There's a historical genesis to all this. The entire western reach of
this country was known as the Great American Desert, and many parts are
still as dry as the Sahara. But as the frontier moved west, suddenly,
instead of speaking about the "desert," we were speaking about the
"Great Basin." We thought we could impose this Jeffersonian ideal of
each man to a farm on the western landscape. That's what John Wesley
Powell found so ridiculous. And if you look at the Grand Canyon from space now, you'll see the Painted Desert and the reservoirs on the
river. What you won't see is cultivated farmland. We've ruined every
river in the arid West but have only managed to cultivate an area the
size of Missouri.

OUTSIDE: And nobody is facing up to this problem?

KENNEDY: I don't see any sign it's being dealt with in ways that are
commensurate with the crisis in the West, and particularly the
Southwest. There's new sprawl development everywhere.

DAVIS: With the Colorado, you've really got to deal with water rights. The
annual flow estimates were made in the 1920s, and we now know that
those were unseasonably wet years and that the flow was overestimated
by at least three million acre feet when it was partitioned between the
states. And now they're all scrambling to maintain their share.

OUTSIDE:How does global warming affect the crisis?

DAVIS: Water is intricately linked to climate change. And all current climate
models suggest that we are entering a period of profoundly lower flows
in the Colorado. We are not in a drought—drought is a misnomer.

KENNEDY: The
hotter it gets, the larger the water crisis is going to become. When
you ask people who are promoting development how we can go on, they
think we'll end up getting water from Canada, that these huge
engineering projects are going to rescue us. That just isn't realistic.
If you had to go to Las Vegas and place a bet that we can rely on the
Canadians to save us—well, it's not a good bet.

MACGillivray: Some people might not really wake up to change until the water company
says, "Folks, you've got to use half as much water, and guess what?
We're going to double the cost."

KENNEDY: Or until the water dries up at the Bellagio.

LIQUID LOGIC

OUTSIDE:Tell me some good news.

KENNEDY: In some specific areas things have gotten better. The discharge of raw
sewage has largely stopped. And if you look at the technologies that
are available today, it's really exciting. Right now in New York City,
you've got 50 buildings costing $25 million each being constructed, and
all of them are green. We can preserve the countryside by having the
municipalities grow upward, not outward, and we can preserve existing
water supplies and even accommodate a lot more people than we have
today.

DAVIS: Like all great issues,
water will find its moment. It took us years to get to a point where
people recognized that climate change existed and was a serious
challenge. Social change happens that way. Al Gore could have easily
released An Inconvenient Truth four years ago and just provoked more Al Gore jokes.

KENNEDY: The people of our country want to be mobilized. They want to feel
they're participating in something greater than themselves. We have
extraordinary opportunities to do that right now just by making a few
tiny changes in how the market functions. New York City only installed
water metering in the nineties. For 150 years, if you left your water
running all day, you didn't get charged. Now the city's saved hundreds
of millions of dollars because there's less water going into the sewers.

DAVIS: If we manage to green the economy, you're going to see a level of
wealth that will make the dot-com thing look like a blip. It's going to
be a total transformation of the urban-rural landscape. Every single
thing we engage in is going to be replaced. That's our great hope:
American ingenuity, entrepreneurial energy, greed—whatever you want to
call it.

KENNEDY: Just let people make
money doing good things. Stop subsidizing the most wasteful resource
users and give renewables an even shot. We have the scientific capacity
to avert the most catastrophic effects of global warming. The question
is, do we have the political will?

MACGILLIVRAY: That's why the big important message
at the end of the film is to vote. Don't just sit on the side and be
pessimistic about government and your choices. Actually try to effect
change.

In a career spanning 40-plus years, director Greg MacGillivray has
worked on 34 giant-screen projects and taken Imax cameras to the top of
Everest and hundreds of feet below the surface of the South Pacific.
For Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk, he spent about $8 million (roughly 1/25 the cost of The Golden Compass) and followed a proven method to success.

1. Bring Two of Everything

That includes the 350-pound Imax 3-D cameras. MacGillivray didn't
ever plan to use both at once, but he wanted an extra just in case. The
film team packed the million-dollar machines in watertight plastic
boxes, and when it was time for an action shot they simply fastened one
to a raft and hoped for the best. Neither camera got hurt, though one
lens suffered $12,000 of damage.

2. Hire Multitaskers

MacGillivray's film crew consisted of just ten people. His assistant
director, Brad Ohlund, was also the director of photography. "It's
better to work with a small, talented crew for a longer time than rush
things with a giant team," he says.

3. Know the Flow

Two years before the trip, the director and his wife, Barbara, ran the
Colorado on their own, scouting and taping locations. "You have to work
out every move ahead of time," he says. "You can't waste a setup."

4. But Don't Plan It All

"It's
a documentary—you don't really know where you'll get your best stuff,"
says MacGillivray. He planned 50 percent of his shooting locations—the
rest of the time, he reacted to conditions.

5. Think Fast, Move Slow

Every morning on the river, MacGillivray and lead guide Regan Dale, from Angels Camp, California–based outfitter O.A.R.S.,
went over hazards. Safety is a big concern for the filmmaker, who in
1976 saw his business partner Jim Freeman die in a helicopter crash on
location. "If you move slowly and cautiously, you can avoid injuries.
On this trip, we didn't have any."

Rockin’ the Boat

After "Holy crap!" the most common audience refrain you'll probably
hear during the film is "Wait, I know this song." That's because the
soundtrack is performed by Dave Matthews Band.
In between the familiar tunes is an original instrumental score
co-written by Matthews's bass player, Stefan Lessard, and longtime
MacGillivray Freeman Films composer Steve Wood. Lessard played a bass
and an acoustic 12-string Veillette guitar for the collaboration, which
had him and Wood jamming as they watched clips from the river. The
biggest challenge was conceiving music for the layered, six-track Imax
surround-sound system. "I'm so used to working in stereo," says
Lessard. "But this is the way music is supposed to be heard." The band
plans to promote the film when it tours later this year. Will anyone
pay attention? "Our fans are smart and willing to listen," Lessard
insists. "They're going to respond to this issue." —M.R.